It’s certainly a cool language, but this presentation doesn’t really convey it very well. When you want to show me how a language is useful, I absolutely want t

It’s certainly a cool language, but this presentation doesn’t really convey it very well. When you want to show me how a language is useful, I absolutely want to hear the boring details, examples of how to manipulate census data, how to serve a web page, and all that. But when you want to show me how a language is cool, I really just want to see gimmicks: neat tricks you can do with the array operations, ways of composing things that are easy in APL that wouldn’t even occur to you in another language, that sort of thing. I actually got the impression, from the way that Morten put it, that APL is not a terribly good environment for collaboration. It seems best suited to a single person having a “conversation”, if you will, with the APL environment—not necessarily with other developers. I’ve never written anything in APL, let alone in a team, so I could be way off. But then again, if it’s so productive, I’m not sure how much it actually matters if only one guy is working on the software at a time. Maybe software is only built collaboratively because the tools aren’t powerful enough to let a single developer manage all the complexity. If you have better tools, perhaps you simply don’t need to work in a team.